PIX Health Center

Sleep is an essential function of life. It allows the body to rest and repair itself after a day of activity. It is so important that it accounts for one third of your life. Getting enough of sleep can help preserve your health. Sadly, a lot of people nowadays have to forgo sleep for getting more done and by becoming more productive. The eventual result is that the health is affected and the body becomes more susceptible to stress and the elements.

Getting enough sleep can mean getting as much as 7 to 8 hours of it daily. But to some people, it can be easily said than done. There are others who might suffer from sleep problems. Others don’t think that they would need as much as 7 to 8 hours sleep in order to become productive. And there are certain myths about sleep that people tend to believe but are actually not true. Here are some of them.

Most highly productive people can go for less than 5 hours of sleep.
Studies have shown that only an estimated 10 percent of people are able to go for less than 7 to 8 hours of sleep without their health being affected. For the rest, cheating on their sleep can have disastrous consequences. A study conducted by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania had volunteers divided into groups that followed different sleep regimes. (more…)

After you put the last dinner dishes away and the evening news, you probably think about going to bed. But for the 40 million estimated Americans who suffer from a chronic sleep disorder, going to bed doesn’t necessarily mean going to sleep. And for the 20 to 30 million others who experience occasional sleep disturbances, nighttime isn’t a picnic.

Some researchers have postulated that the United States is the most sleep deprived country. And it’s no wonder. With 24-hour factories and malls, high stress levels at work, and round-the-clock schedules, Americans barely have time to breathe, much less sleep a good 8 hours every night.

Even when you want to sleep, the cares of the day sometimes keep you from closing your eyes. In fact, according to the National Sleep Foundation, on any given night, slightly more than 1-4 Americans rate the quality of their night’s sleep as either “fair” or “poor”

Of course, the Americans aren’t alone in their devotion to round-the-clock living. Scandinavians stay up quite late as a way of dealing with their midnight sun. and many Northern European countries have more shift workers than the United States, and their citizens tend to their coffee and more of it than Americans. (more…)